


A Dark Mind

by Llwyden ferch Gyfrinach (Llwyden)



Category: A Dark Room (Doublespeak Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Backstory, F/F, Misses Clause Challenge, POV Second Person, Post-Apocalypse, Rebuilding, Worldbuilding, Xenophilia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-09
Updated: 2013-12-09
Packaged: 2018-01-04 04:29:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1076542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Llwyden/pseuds/Llwyden%20ferch%20Gyfrinach
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes skills are hard-learned, community is hard-won, and love is hard to figure out.</p>
<p>Sometimes an apocalypse can be the best thing to happen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Dark Mind

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Masu_Trout](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Masu_Trout/gifts).



> Many thanks to my lovely beta voksen!
> 
> I hope you enjoy this, Masu_Trout; have a lovely Yuletide!

You’d like to say it was the worst day of your life when the aliens arrived. They brought destruction and death on a scale no-one had ever seen before. Everyone that you’d known all your life died in those first few weeks. It wasn’t even really a war; war takes two sides, and humans never had a chance.

You’d like to say it was awful. You do, when people ask. When you meet other survivors, huddled into caves and burned-out buildings, and they look at you with hollow eyes, you agree with them about how horrible it is.

You never stay long.

The truth is, you were dying before that day. A mechanical engineer with passion but without a job, a found-item artist whose family rolled their eyes and asked why you couldn’t make something useful. No boyfriend, no girlfriend, just an empty walk-up that you were running out of rent money for. Nobody would’ve missed you, and you were just coming to terms with that fact. Trying to decide between a sword of your forging and a Rube Goldberg machine of your engineering for the job. Hoping to find at least a little elegance and use for your passion.

The aliens stopped all that.

You decided early on not to stay in the cities; the aliens brought the buildings down, but the humans left behind were doing a fine job on themselves. You struck out instead, and found out just how damaged the world was these days. You should say you were heartbroken, but it just felt like the blasted, twisted wasteland outside matched you inside now. There was art all around you, and it was too beautiful to die.

You still nearly starved those first weeks, until you learned the proper types of traps to make, and how to skin and cook the animals they brought you. Some of them were more or less familiar; some you’d never seen before. You wondered if they’d been brought by the aliens, or created by the same power that had blasted the land.

These days, you do fairly well for yourself. There are some others out there who aren’t completely useless; none of you have much, but you trade in knowledge. You teach them trapping, and they teach you which plants they’ve learned are poisonous and which ones are good to eat. You show them how to make a spear that’s good and sturdy, and they show you how to tan the hides you’ve been getting.

Some of them tell stories, too. About the army taking over cities and resources, the men in charge keeping everything for themselves or funneling it to unknown places. There are rumors of leaders safe in luxurious bunkers running everything. Personally, you doubt the leaders were ever that coordinated. But you keep a careful eye out anyway.

You do just fine for years. You’re hungry sometimes, and thirsty sometimes, and bored sometimes, but honestly you never thought you’d be _alive_ at this age, so you figure you’re winning. You keep moving, keep trading, keep creating things.

And then winter hits.

It’s a hard one; you’ve had a bit of chill before, but nothing like this. This is like winters were back before it all happened, with the cold that leaches all the heat out of you, and no matter how many furs you wrap around yourself, you can’t get warm. You can’t trade for food anymore; the few families wandering the blasted lands have barely enough to feed themselves. You huddle in the tall grasses, wind howling over them; fire would be deadly, but the cold may kill you anyway.

You keep walking. You remember tales from when you were little, of people who stopped walking and lay down in the snow and never got up again. There’s no snow here — not enough water in the air — but you keep moving anyway.

There are trees in the distance, and you hurry toward them. Trees mean a break from the wind, and enough water to grow them, and hopefully small animals for food.

By the time you reach the tree-line, you can barely stand upright. At first you think the light is a mirage, but you head toward it anyway, just in case. Your hands and feet are numb, but you reach the door and collapse inside by the fire. You should care where you are, but right now all you can think of are _warmth_ and _sleep_.

Impressions filter in as you lie there: the warmth of the hearth, a quick gust of wind, movement nearby. “Please let me stay,” you try to say, but you still can’t quite feel all of your face. You drift off again, though, and the warmth stays, so maybe they understood.

At some point later, you couldn’t say when, you wake up warm and more rested than you’ve felt in a while. The fire you’ve been curled up by lights a cabin, crudely made. The only door is the one you came in through, and the only furniture a rickety-looking cupboard stripped bare of anything useful.

There’s a window on the same side as the door, and you clean enough grime off of it to look out. It’s a grey day outside as usual, and it takes you a moment to notice the mottled grey-green skin of the being moving through the trees. It’s equal parts terrifying and fascinating; you’ve never seen one of them up close before. You don’t know anyone who has. It occurs to you to wonder if this is the same race that killed everything, or just some scavenger or wanderer passing through. You don’t wonder for long, though, because once you notice it you can see what it’s doing.

It’s gathering wood for the fire.

You stay alert when it comes back, just in case it decides a standing, living human is more trouble than a shivering, dying one, but it just closes the door and stands there blinking at you for a moment. Then it nods and stokes the fire and looks at you. You step cautiously toward the fire and stand there, getting warmer again. You think you see it smile.

“Are you here all alone?” you ask. You don’t know if it can understand you, but it nods. “Thank you,” you add awkwardly. It occurs to you that you owe it your life. “I can help you,” you offer. “I build things.”

 

And you do. You have your tools, crafted and collected over the years, and you build traps to catch animals for meat and fur and a cart to carry wood in. It stretches its back and nearly preens when it first carts back wood without having to carry it; you laugh and it gives you that odd smile again.

You still don’t know if this is one of the aliens that destroyed so much of the world, or one of its kin, or another species altogether. It could even be a mutated human, you suppose; though you’ve never seen one like this before, there are always rumors. But it doesn’t seem to care about anything more than food and warmth and, for some reason, you.

You build a storeroom to keep the wood and furs in, hoping you can trade them later. It occurs to you that this little pocket of woods has more than enough life to sustain a good-sized community if it had to, so one night you bring it up. “I could build a hut or two. If we had places for people to live, word would get out.” You’re not sure yourself if you say it out of a sense of human obligation or to see what your companion’s reaction is, but it just nods and smiles.

 

You do build a hut. Then another. You add a small outhouse room onto your cabin. When it’s too dark to work outside, you work on the wood inside, carving decorative lintels and frames. Your companion watches you and smiles and sometimes points and asks wordless questions. You explain what different symbols mean. When you’re too tired to carve, you tell it stories. It stokes the fire and pays attention. It moves gradually closer on these nights, until one night you find yourself drifting off against its side. It’s surprisingly warm for something that looks mostly reptilian. You wonder if you should apologize, but it nudges your back with its tail and coaxes you closer.

Maybe you aren’t the only one who’s been a bit lonely.

 

Word does get out. People wander in from the barren wastes and the grasslands. Some of them trade, some eye your companion warily and flee. Good riddance. Others stay; it’s a hard life these days, and shelter and relative comfort overcomes their initial fear the way your freezing did yours. Intolerance is a luxury not worth paying for.

Some of the people that move in are hunters; not all the animals in the woods are small and foolish enough for traps. You build them a lodge just outside the edge of town, with rooms for skinning the beasts and processing their meat. Some of them know tanning and curing, and there are places for that, too.

You all make it through the next winter with nothing worse than tightened belts, and when the Spring’s first big catch is made, your little village dares to celebrate. Fresh meat, frozen greens, and a kind of fermented cider one of the women experimented with (it’s not exactly good, but it’s not bad, either) leave you giddy and happy for the first time you can remember in far too long.

You lean on your companion on the way back to your room, and the two of you wrap around each other. It gives the rumbling whine, not quite a purr, that it makes when it’s happy, and you’re not willing to let the happy feeling go just yet. You pull it after you into the bed and rub your cheek on its soft, scaly skin. It wraps its arms around you and drapes its tail over your waist.

It isn’t human, but you knew that. You don’t know if its species can be judged by human standards, but if it can, it’s more like you than you thought. It…she…is female.

 

A superstitious corner of your brain says that it was the celebration that drew the attack. Armed men storm in one afternoon, to raid your stores and kill anyone who gets in their way. You all fight fiercely, but spears and fists and one lone rifle only do so much good. From a town of thirty, you become a town of twenty overnight.

 You wish you could make better protection for the village, maybe some early-warning system. “I could do so much more if I just had the tools!” you tell your companion, and she croons at you soothingly.

Traders come through, and the villagers offer up their furs and sundries to buy you tools for your workshop. You almost don’t accept, but the first woman to join you smiles. She calls you Builder, and says none of them would be alive without you.

You buy the tools.

You make better wheels for your carts, better wind proofing for your homes. You make hidden platforms in the trees to keep watch for outsiders.

Your companion takes to making longer trips out from your little village, coming back with scales, fur, and teeth from grassland animals. You make her a waterskin and rudimentary leather armor and tell her to be safe. Once, she comes back with a sword. Once, precious medicine. You keep the medicine close in case of real need and spend several nights sharpening and polishing the sword. You sigh. “It’s a shame we don’t have more metal.” Your companion nuzzles you.

Three weeks later, she comes back with deep wounds and the map to an iron mine. You scold her as you bandage her up, and she smiles at you.

Your town is back to thirty-five now, and one of the new families knows how to dig and smelt ore. Most of the mine’s equipment is still intact, and you manage to fix the rest. Once you’ve got the metal, you make fittings for the carts, water tanks and pumps to give you running water, and metal stoves to burn wood more efficiently. You also make swords, and better armor.

The next time the raiders come back, you go from a town of fifty to a town of forty-five, but they go from twenty to ten.

 

Your companion’s trips get longer. She finds valuable things — more swords, another rifle and a handful of bullets, even an abandoned coal mine (or “abandoned”; she thinks you don’t see that slice on her tail) that means warmer winters and less reliance on wood, but you worry that she may be drifting away. You hold her close on the nights she’s home, make love to her gently, but she still goes away.

You hold tight to the thought that she always comes back.

One night she comes back stinking to high heaven, and you bar the door to keep from bringing that stench in the house. You shove her into the lake, and she gives a hissing laugh.

The next day, you take apart one of the rifles and learn to make one. The villagers mine the sulfur, and you trade a fresh-made rifle for instructions on making gunpowder.

The next time the raiders arrive, the only deaths are theirs. They don’t come back.

 

Your town grows to eighty, with a few more on the way now that the families feel secure. You gain a medic and a steelworker that helps you build a factory. You’re an actual city now, you suppose. They all call you Builder. You wear it like the badge of honor it is; you were never overly attached to your given name, anyway.

They call your companion Wanderer. Nobody knows her name, not even you; you don’t know if her people even have a spoken language you could learn. You certainly can’t make the hisses, screeches, and growls you’ve heard from her. She doesn’t seem to mind, though. Some people treat her with bare tolerance, some with overt affection, and she nods at them all and gives them her almost-smile.

Her trips get longer. She comes back with odd metal that you work with caution; it seems safe, but there’s no real telling. She also comes back with gestured and drawn stories of cities, some empty of everything and some just empty of hope. She comes back troubled and fearful once, and her story is of a youth, barely more than a boy, that attacked her. She killed him, and she worries you’ll turn against her for it.

You kiss her. You show her all the youths in your own village that she’s helped to save. You don’t judge anyone for surviving anymore.

 

Your village is thriving. You have two apprentices now, helping you build things. You have miners and factory workers as well as trappers and hunters. You even have a meadery and a tavern. You worry sometimes about the soldiers your companion talks about, and about the city folk, but so far, they haven’t caused any trouble your town can’t handle.

Then your companion returns. Her painstaking map of her travels has a large symbol on it, right at the edge. You don’t understand what it means, and she’s too excited to make her gestures understood. She leaves with several of the villagers and a wagon, and comes back a week later with a damaged spacecraft.

 

You’re excited at first, examining it with an eye to all the things you could learn, but most of what’s in it tells you nothing useful about running a village or building homes or crafting metal, so you give it up. You’ll wait till your companion tires of it, and melt it for the metal.

She doesn’t.

She works on it instead, cajoling you into using the odd metal — clearly from another one of these — to patch the holes in its hull, to fix its engine. The closer to finished it gets, the more excited she gets.

You stop talking to her. When you’re not helping fix the damned ship, you spend your time with your apprentices or helping the miners or sitting at the tavern. Any place else but with her. You can’t help but wonder if this is what all those trips were about in the first place. If all the time you thought she was trying to help the village, trying to make you proud, she just wanted to leave you all behind.

You take night duty at one of the town’s guard posts until she leaves on another trip.

 

Sooner than you’d like, she’s back, carrying more of the strange metal with her. You fix the ship. You can’t help but do a good job; you should probably wish her ill for her using you, but it’s what she had to do to survive, too. Besides, you’re the Builder; you’ll be damned if you’re letting anything out of your (literal or metaphorical) workshop that isn’t worth that name.

She comes to watch you work, and seems confused by your coldness. She tries to wrap herself around you and you hiss, the best approximation of her anger you can manage. She startles and steps back.

That night, she comes to your bed, touching you tentatively. You look at her face and try not to cry or hit her. “You did what you had to do. I don’t blame you,” you tell her. “But I’m not letting  you back in. It’ll already hurt enough when you go.”

You roll over to face the wall. She leaves.

You don’t see her again till the ship is done. It’s as spaceworthy as you can make it, anyway, given you’ve never even seen a spaceship up close before. You’re cleaning up your tools when she gets to the site outside the woods where the thing has been squatting. She’s hesitant and apologetic. Tells you in gestures and expressions that she does feel affection for you. (You want to read that more seriously. You won’t, just in case.) That she’d like to stay, but doesn’t belong here.

You stare at her in disbelief. Eventually, you shake your head. “Who belongs here more than you? We’ve got a home, we’ve got each other, we’ve got a whole _city_ that relies on us. That you helped build!”

She makes a doubtful noise. You grab her nearest limb and yank her after you through the trees until you get to the main square.

“The Wanderer is leaving!” you yell. “The Wanderer thinks she has no place here!”

There are disbelieving looks. There’s even a bark of laughter from the tavern door.

One woman steps forward and shows off the scar on her shoulder. “I’d have died last year if not for the medicine the Wanderer brought back.”

A man with black-creased hands joins her. “My whole family survived the winter because of the coal mine the Wanderer found.”

A young woman with a determined scowl sticks her chin out. “My folks were killed by raiders a few years ago. I killed three raiders the next year with bullets we made from the things you found us.”

A man with a small boy by the hand walks up. “We were dying when we found this place. Not even enough to feed me and my wife. Now we’ve got kids, and they won’t go hungry.”

There are other stories, too. Some of the villagers speak over each other in their enthusiasm. All of them mean the same thing: you belong here. You’re one of us.

She looks stunned by it all. You shake your head. How has she really not realized all of this?

She turns back to you, and you set your jaw and purse your lips, then sigh. “I love you,” you add.

The hull of the ship makes a wonderfully defensible town hall.


End file.
